Golf fans lining the course, and others watching on television had the excitement of this weekend’s Open extended today after Sunday’s play ended with a tie between Woods and fellow American Rocco Mediate.

It took 19 more holes before Woods emerged this afternoon as the winner of the 108th U.S. Open at Torrey Pines in San Diego, California.

The world’s number one golfer won with a two-putt par on No. 7, the first sudden-death hole. Mediate failed to sink his par putt from 20 feet.

‘We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist,’ said uncontacted tribes expert José Carlos dos Reis Meirelles Júnior. Meirelles works for FUNAI, the Brazilian government’s Indian affairs department. ‘This is very important because there are some who doubt their existence.’

Meirelles says that the group’s numbers are increasing. But other uncontacted groups in the region, whose homes have been photographed from the air, are in severe danger from illegal logging in Peru. Logging is driving uncontacted tribes over the border and could lead to conflict with the estimated five hundred uncontacted Indians already living on the Brazilian side.

Image above: Indians in Brazil fire arrows at airplane, May 2008
© Gleison Miranda/FUNAI

‘What is happening in this region [of Peru] is a monumental crime against the natural world, the tribes, the fauna and is further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the ‘civilised’ ones, treat the world,’ said Meirelles.

There are more than one hundred uncontacted tribes worldwide, with more than half living in either Brazil or Peru. All are in grave danger of being forced off their land, killed and decimated by new diseases. Survival has launched an urgent campaign to get their land protected, and a unique film narrated by actress Julie Christie.

Survival’s director Stephen Corry says, ‘These pictures are further evidence that uncontacted tribes really do exist. The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct.’

For more information, visit www.survival-international.org/

Hungary was the first country in Europe to legislate against the Jewish minority in 1920. In the late 1930s and early 1940s several anti-Jewish laws were introduced, but the deportations did not take place until after the German occupation in March 1944. Then, over half of the country’s 800,000 Jews were transported in goods trains to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the majority were killed immediately after arrival.

The thesis Yellow Stars and Trouser Inspections is based on 151 interviews, reports and memoirs with and by Hungarian Jews who survived the Holocaust. Most of them came from Budapest, and belonged to the group that was not deported but that experienced the terror of the Fascist Arrow Cross party. With the aid of these accounts Laura Palosuo has analysed the way Jewish men and women of different ages and from different social strata describe the persecution and their own reactions to it, and how their experiences can be linked to gender, age and class.

The results show that the experiences were extremely complex, and that they cannot be related just to ‘race’.

“A clear example of the role played by gender was the so-called trouser inspections. When a Jewish man was outdoors the authorities could easily check whether he was circumcised by simply pulling down his trousers,” says Laura Palosuo.

Jewish women could move about outdoors more freely if they removed the yellow star, and since they did not have any physical markers indicating their ‘Jewishness’ they could more easily avoid harassment. However, the differences linked to gender, age and class were erased in the course of time, and towards the end of the war these factors came to play a smaller and smaller role in people’s experiences.

Analysing the importance of gender combined with other factors in the way Laura Palosuo has done is a new and unexplored perspective in the field of genocide research.

“The results are of interest to anyone who wants to know more about how people perceive and react to catastrophic situations,” she says.

source:Uppsala University.

A documentary film titled “Shine A Light” debuts April 4, and promises to show the world Mick, Keith, Charlie and Ron as they’ve never been seen before.

Produced by Academy Award winning filmmaker Martin Scorsese, the footage centers around the band’s Fall 2006 performance at the famed Beacon Theatre in New York City during its “Bigger Bang” tour.

If you can’t wait until the movie’s release, visit the film’s official website:
http://www.shinealightmovie.com

The former Massachusetts governor made the announcement just after noon in Washington, D.C., in an address before the Conservative Political Action Conference. “This is not an easy decision for me. I hate to lose,” said Romney. I entered this race because I love America, and because I love America, I feel I must now stand aside, for our party and for our country,” he said.

McCain reacted by congratulating Romney on running a “spirited campaign,” and invited Romney’s supporters to support him.

Political observers are saying Romney’s decision virtually seals the 2008 Republican presidential nomination for McCain, but third-place contender Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, says don’t count him out just yet. “This is a two-man race for the nomination, and I am committed to marching on,” Huckabee said in a statement.

Texan Ron Paul is also showing no signs of stepping aside. His website shows more than $5 million in his campaign chest.

Dr Paul Nicholson, of the University’s School of History and Archaeology, is leader of an Egypt Exploration Society team working on the earliest fully excavated glassmaking site in the world. The site, at Amarna, on the banks of the Nile, dates back to the reign of Akhanaten (1352 - 1336 B.C.), just a few years before the rule of Tutankhamun.

Image above caption: The reconstructed kiln built by Dr. Paul Nicholson of Cardiff University and Dr. Caroline Jackson of Sheffield University.

Credit: Cardiff University

It was previously thought that the Ancient Egyptians may have imported their glass from the Near East at around this time. However, the excavation team believes the evidence from Amarna shows they were making it themselves, possibly in a single stage operation. Dr Nicholson and his colleague Dr Caroline Jackson of Sheffield University demonstrated this was possible, using local sand to produce a glass ingot from their own experimental reconstruction of a furnace near the site.

The team have also discovered that the glassworks was part of an industrial complex which involved a number of other high temperature manufacturing processes. The site also contained a potter’s workshop and facilities for making blue pigment and faience - a material used in amulets and architectural inlays. The site was near one of the main temples at Amarna and may have been used to produce materials in state buildings.

Dr Nicholson, who has been working at Amarna since 1983, said: “It has been argued that the Egyptians imported their glass and worked it into the artefacts that have been discovered from this time. I believe there is now enough evidence to show that skilled craftsmen could make their own glass and were probably involved in a range of other manufacturing industries as well.”

source:Cardiff University.

“We used a new genomic technology to show that humans are evolving rapidly, and that the pace of change has accelerated a lot in the last 40,000 years, especially since the end of the Ice Age roughly 10,000 years ago,” says research team leader Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah.

Harpending says there are provocative implications from the study, published online Monday, Dec. 10 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

– “We aren’t the same as people even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago,” he says, which may explain, for example, part of the difference between Viking invaders and their peaceful Swedish descendants. “The dogma has been these are cultural fluctuations, but almost any temperament trait you look at is under strong genetic influence.”

– “Human races are evolving away from each other,” Harpending says. “Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin. We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity.” He says that is happening because humans dispersed from Africa to other regions 40,000 years ago, “and there has not been much flow of genes between the regions since then.”

“Our study denies the widely held assumption or belief that modern humans [those who widely adopted advanced tools and art] appeared 40,000 years ago, have not changed since and that we are all pretty much the same. We show that humans are changing relatively rapidly on a scale of centuries to millennia, and that these changes are different in different continental groups.”

The increase in human population from millions to billions in the last 10,000 years accelerated the rate of evolution because “we were in new environments to which we needed to adapt,” Harpending adds. “And with a larger population, more mutations occurred.”

Study co-author Gregory M. Cochran says: “History looks more and more like a science fiction novel in which mutants repeatedly arose and displaced normal humans – sometimes quietly, by surviving starvation and disease better, sometimes as a conquering horde. And we are those mutants.”

Harpending conducted the study with Cochran, a New Mexico physicist, self-taught evolutionary biologist and adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Utah; anthropologist John Hawks, a former Utah postdoctoral researcher now at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; geneticist Eric Wang of Affymetrix, Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif.; and biochemist Robert Moyzis of the University of California, Irvine.

No Justification for Discrimination

The new study comes from two of the same University of Utah scientists – Harpending and Cochran – who created a stir in 2005 when they published a study arguing that above-average intelligence in Ashkenazi Jews – those of northern European heritage – resulted from natural selection in medieval Europe, where they were pressured into jobs as financiers, traders, managers and tax collectors. Those who were smarter succeeded, grew wealthy and had bigger families to pass on their genes. Yet that intelligence also is linked to genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher in Jews.

That study and others dealing with genetic differences among humans – whose DNA is more than 99 percent identical – generated fears such research will undermine the principle of human equality and justify racism and discrimination. Other critics question the quality of the science and argue culture plays a bigger role than genetics.

Harpending says genetic differences among different human populations “cannot be used to justify discrimination. Rights in the Constitution aren’t predicated on utter equality. People have rights and should have opportunities whatever their group.”

Analyzing SNPs of Evolutionary Acceleration

The study looked for genetic evidence of natural selection – the evolution of favorable gene mutations – during the past 80,000 years by analyzing DNA from 270 individuals in the International HapMap Project, an effort to identify variations in human genes that cause disease and can serve as targets for new medicines.

The new study looked specifically at genetic variations called “single nucleotide polymorphisms,” or SNPs (pronounced “snips”) which are single-point mutations in chromosomes that are spreading through a significant proportion of the population.

Imagine walking along two chromosomes – the same chromosome from two different people. Chromosomes are made of DNA, a twisting, ladder-like structure in which each rung is made of a “base pair” of amino acids, either G-C or A-T. Harpending says that about every 1,000 base pairs, there will be a difference between the two chromosomes. That is known as a SNP.

Data examined in the study included 3.9 million SNPs from the 270 people in four populations: Han Chinese, Japanese, Africa’s Yoruba tribe and northern Europeans, represented largely by data from Utah Mormons, says Harpending.

Over time, chromosomes randomly break and recombine to create new versions or variants of the chromosome. “If a favorable mutation appears, then the number of copies of that chromosome will increase rapidly” in the population because people with the mutation are more likely to survive and reproduce, Harpending says.

“And if it increases rapidly, it becomes common in the population in a short time,” he adds.

The researchers took advantage of that to determine if genes on chromosomes had evolved recently. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, with each parent providing one copy of each of the 23. If the same chromosome from numerous people has a segment with an identical pattern of SNPs, that indicates that segment of the chromosome has not broken up and recombined recently.

That means a gene on that segment of chromosome must have evolved recently and fast; if it had evolved long ago, the chromosome would have broken and recombined.

Harpending and colleagues used a computer to scan the data for chromosome segments that had identical SNP patterns and thus had not broken and recombined, meaning they evolved recently. They also calculated how recently the genes evolved.

A key finding: 7 percent of human genes are undergoing rapid, recent evolution.

The researchers built a case that human evolution has accelerated by comparing genetic data with what the data should look like if human evolution had been constant:

* The study found much more genetic diversity in the SNPs than would be expected if human evolution had remained constant.

* If the rate at which new genes evolve in Africans was extrapolated back to 6 million years ago when humans and chimpanzees diverged, the genetic difference between modern chimps and humans would be 160 times greater than it really is. So the evolution rate of Africans represents a recent speedup in evolution.

* If evolution had been fast and constant for a long time, there should be many recently evolved genes that have spread to everyone. Yet, the study revealed many genes still becoming more frequent in the population, indicating a recent evolutionary speedup.

Next, the researchers examined the history of human population size on each continent. They found that mutation patterns seen in the genome data were consistent with the hypothesis that evolution is faster in larger populations.

Evolutionary Change and Human History: Got Milk?

“Rapid population growth has been coupled with vast changes in cultures and ecology, creating new opportunities for adaptation,” the study says. “The past 10,000 years have seen rapid skeletal and dental evolution in human populations, as well as the appearance of many new genetic responses to diet and disease.”

The researchers note that human migrations into new Eurasian environments created selective pressures favoring less skin pigmentation (so more sunlight could be absorbed by skin to make vitamin D), adaptation to cold weather and dietary changes.

Because human population grew from several million at the end of the Ice Age to 6 billion now, more favored new genes have emerged and evolution has speeded up, both globally and among continental groups of people, Harpending says.

“We have to understand genetic change in order to understand history,” he adds.

For example, in China and most of Africa, few people can digest fresh milk into adulthood. Yet in Sweden and Denmark, the gene that makes the milk-digesting enzyme lactase remains active, so “almost everyone can drink fresh milk,” explaining why dairying is more common in Europe than in the Mediterranean and Africa, Harpending says.

He now is studying if the mutation that allowed lactose tolerance spurred some of history’s great population expansions, including when speakers of Indo-European languages settled all the way from northwest India and central Asia through Persia and across Europe 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. He suspects milk drinking gave lactose-tolerant Indo-European speakers more energy, allowing them to conquer a large area.

But Harpending believes the speedup in human evolution “is a temporary state of affairs because of our new environments since the dispersal of modern humans 40,000 years ago and especially since the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago. That changed our diet and changed our social systems. If you suddenly take hunter-gatherers and give them a diet of corn, they frequently get diabetes. We’re still adapting to that. Several new genes we see spreading through the population are involved with helping us prosper with high-carbohydrate diet.”

source:the University of Utah.

Tel Megiddo has been the subject of a number of decisive battles in ancient times (among the Egyptian, Hebrew and Assyrian peoples) and today it holds a venerated place in archaeology, explains site co-director and world-renowned archeologist Prof. Israel Finkelstein.

Above photo caption: At the Megiddo Dig: A General View of Early Bronze Age Temples. Photo Credit: AFTAU

Says Prof. Finkelstein, from the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University, “Megiddo is one of the most interesting sites in the world for the excavation of biblical remains. Now volunteers and students from around the world can participate in the dig which lets them uncover 3,000 years worth of history — from the late 4th millennium B.C.E. to the middle of the first millennium C.E.”

Prof. Finkelstein, who belongs to the Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, has been co-directing the site with Prof. David Ussishkin, also of Tel Aviv University, since 1994.

Prof. Finkelstein has co-authored a best-selling book on archaeology and biblical history (The Bible Unearthed, 2001). Earlier this month he released a book (written with A. Mazar) that contains surprising commentary on biblical archaeology and history, The Quest for Biblical Archeology, published by the Society of Biblical Literature in the United States. He is also the recipient of the prestigious international Dan David Prize in the category of Past Dimension (2005).

Likened to a “lightening rod” by the journal Science (2007), Prof. Finkelstein is famous for his unconventional way of interpreting biblical history: he puts emphasis on the days of the biblical authors in the 7th century B.C.E. and theorizes that ancient rulers such as David and Solomon, who lived centuries earlier, were “tribal chieftains ruling from a small hill town, with a modest palace and royal shrine.”

Yet, “new archaeological discoveries should not erode one’s sense of tradition and identity,” he states.

Prof. Ze’ev Herzog, who heads the archaeology institute at Tel Aviv University, says, “There has been an important revolution in biblical history in the last decades. We are now uncovering the difference between myth and history, and between reality and ideology of the ancient authors. This is the role of our generation of archaeologists — to unearth the real historical reality to find out why and how the biblical records were written.”

The archeologists aren’t the only ones looking for answers. More than one hundred volunteers come from all corners of the world to dig Megiddo alongside Prof. Finkelstein every year. They are teachers, journalists, actors, construction workers, professors and housewives, as well as archaeology, history and divinity students who dig for credit.

The Megiddo dig is offered as a three-week, four-week or seven-week program. As part of the experience, volunteers live in a nearby kibbutz and are exposed to lectures and debates about their findings. The dig is partnered with the George Washington University, represented by Prof. Eric Cline, the American associate director of the dig. This makes it an ideal stomping ground for Americans who want a hands-on education in archaeology.

“Team and staff members come from all around the world for many reasons: the adventure of foreign travel in a safe yet educational environment, intellectual stimulation, and — yes — even a love of digging in the dirt,” notes Prof. Finkelstein.

And those with no prior knowledge or degrees are welcome, he stresses. “We cater to all of the volunteers’ backgrounds and teach them field methods, archeological techniques as well as the history of biblical archeology. It is truly a wonderful experience.”

source:American Friends of Tel Aviv University.

“Whale oil then was like petroleum is today,” says Christopher Baruth. “This is a graphic device that showed where the whales were located by type and season.”

Baruth is curator of the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library, where a copy of the whale map is one of thousands of rare cartographical materials and geographical photographs.

Above image caption: The Mappamundi, the oldest original map in the AGSL holdings, was produced in 1452 by the Venetian cartographer Giovanni Leardo. The circular map, considered the finest example of a medieval wall map in the Western Hemisphere, shows the known world consisting of only Europe, Asia and Africa.

Credit: AGS Library, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Quietly housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) since 1978, the AGS Library contains more than a million items, half of which are maps and charts, some dating to 15th century, and some that aren’t available anywhere else, even at the Library of Congress.

The value of the items in the AGS collections is compounded by their connection to the society. AGS is the oldest national geographical society in the United States, founded in 1851 in New York City.

Explorer-members, such as Charles Lindbergh, Robert Peary and Theodore Roosevelt, are among those who donated items associated with their exploits to the society over the years. Materials in the collection have been consulted not only by scholars, but also by the U.S. government during and at the end of both world wars. Today, it attracts scholars from as far away as Uzbekistan.

“It’s a national treasure,” says Robert McColl, professor emeritus of geography and East Asian studies at the University of Kansas, who in 2000 donated to AGSL his own geographical library, one of the best personal collections of Chinese materials in the world.

Stories of intrigue

McColl is one of the many travelers and scholars who, in addition to the famous, have helped build the collection.

“I went to China early enough that I found some items that are terribly unique, that might have disappeared otherwise,” says McColl. Through his contacts in China, he found many works and maps that might have been produced in limited quantities or pulled off the market.” He also found rare books, sometimes bound in silk, in flea markets. “People were selling them for food,” he says.

It’s like that with the contents of the AGSL, says Baruth. Each piece testifies to the adventurers, rare circumstances and history behind them – with as much intrigue as any work of fiction found in the other stacks of the UWM Libraries.

Notable contents include a wide range of materials, from black-and-white renderings done by hand to digital spatial data, from turn-of-the-century photographs of arctic exploration to charts used by Charles Lindbergh to fly from New York to Paris in 1927.

Chicago Festival of Maps

When asked to choose a “Top 10” from the collection, Baruth shakes his head slowly and replies, “That’s like asking you to rank your children.”

But three of the library’s possessions are on view (http://www.uwm.edu/Libraries/AGSL/festivalmaps.html) at the Field Museum in Chicago, where the World Festival of Maps is hosting what many consider to be one of the greatest map exhibits of the century, “Maps: Finding Our Place in the World.” In addition to the whale map described above, two more AGS holdings stand alongside cartographic gems from around the world at the exhibit, which runs through Jan. 27, 2008.

One is a unique manuscript map from about 1910 of the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay. It was drawn from memory on the back of a missionary lithograph by an Inuit named Wetalltok, and given to Robert J. Flaherty, who created the film “Nanook of the North.” It is the most accurate map of the islands then extant.

The other item on loan is the Mappamundi, the oldest original map in the AGSL holdings, produced in 1452 by the Venetian cartographer Giovanni Leardo. The circular map, considered the finest example of a medieval wall map in the Western Hemisphere, shows the known world consisting of only Europe, Asia and Africa, a configuration Baruth calls a T-O map. (“Imagine a capital ‘ T’ inside a circle separating the three continents.”)

As in many medieval maps, Jerusalem is situated in the center of the Mappamundi, and the names of regions were copied from those of a second-century geographer named Claudius Ptolemy. As the Age of Discovery advanced, Ptolemy’s original work was filled in and expanded by explorers, spawning new editions called “novae tabulae.”

AGSL has many such editions of these “Ptolemys,” including a rare original from 1478 that was printed on vellum (animal skin).

Catalog incomplete

In the mid-1970s the AGS could no longer afford to archive its holdings and chose UWM to house the collection after a national search. It took nearly five years to orchestrate the move and surmount the legal challenges.

And Baruth concedes that riches may still lie hidden in the holdings.

In the library’s more recent history, Baruth unearthed two prizes from the wall-length bookshelf in his own office: a first-edition copy of “Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville and a travel book given to the AGS by a young Teddy Roosevelt. Neither was found in the catalog at the time.

UWM Professor Bruce Fetter began specializing in both cartography and demography soon after UWM acquired the collection to better make use of the resource. He has been teaching a class on how to use the collection for 26 years.

“This material is essential because it affects how we see the world,” says Fetter. “It is a wonderful way of getting a picture of the past.”

source: University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.

“Overwhelmed with Kind Words and Lovely Thoughts,” it says on the blog, “We have received thousands of beautiful comments and we will try to post each and every one of them. But the fact that some are not listed yet is only because my family and I are trying to catch up!”

Martha Kostyra, a retired school teacher, delighted her daughter’s fans with frequent appearances on Martha Stewart’s television programs. She died Friday in a Norwalk, Connecticut hospital, just over one week after suffering a stroke.

Mrs. Kostyra was preceded in death by her husband, Edward Kostyra. The couple’s six children survive her, along with 13 grandchildren, one great-grandchild, and a brother and sister.

Photo Credit: Family photo of Martha Kostyra in September at her 93rd birthday party, as posted on Martha Stewart Blog at marthastewart.com